The following is from ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE -
ISSUE 4.3 - JUNE 1999.
Talking With Con Pederson
by William Moritz
In early May, William Moritz visited with Con Pederson,
a visual effects pioneer, who worked closely with Stanley
Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Credited as one of four Special Photographic Effects
Supervisors on the film, he and Doug Trumbull created a
myriad of stars, planets, and space ships, plus the
unforgettable stargate sequence.
The interview at this Web page URL:
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue4.03/4.03pages/moritzpederson.php3
Now I do not have my copy of The Cosmic Connection: An
Extraterrestrial Perspective (New York: Doubleday, 1973)
handy, but I am trying to remember if Sagan mentioned in
it his being filmed for 2001?
Sagan was consulted by Kubrick and Clarke on how to make
the ETI look (Answer: Leave it up to the imaginations
of the film audience). See this Web page for details:
http://www.underview.com/2001/views2.html#aliens
I have also read in several places that the Stargate scene
with the diamond shapes swirling above a multicolor landscape
were in fact the ETI who created the Monoliths and the
Humanity Evolution Liftup Program, or HELP. At least they
were definitely not humanoids.
No doubt Sagan was consulted due to his co-authoring of
one of the early serious science books on the subject of
alien life -- Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii, Intelligent
Life in the Universe (New York: Random House, 1966). The
book came out during the early filming of 2001.
Although it would have been neat to see (or at least
hear) a young Sagan waxing poetic about alien beings,
I am glad they removed the narration, as that is what
makes 2001 so wonderful: It left the details up to
the audience to fill in and - gasp - think about!
Had 2001 explained more, it would have become like 2010,
a nice technical film but with little mystery and far too
much on-screen talking.
The relevant quote:
That whole Stargate sequence replaced what originally was
a trip through the cosmos to see where the extraterrestrials
were coming from. We had toyed with the idea of the
extraterrestrials being defined and explained by a narrator.
We thought of different narrators and I suggested a guy named
Doug Raine who had done a film on astronomy in Canada that was
really great. I got the film and Stanley liked Doug's voice,
but it turned out that he had to have a new voice for Hal, the
computer, which was originally a woman called Athena in the
first version. Anyway, Hal 9000 needed a voice and Stanley tried
quite a lot of people for it, and didn't care for any of the
voices. At that point, we threw out the narrator -- decided it
was going to be too preachy, too stodgy to have a narrator, and
too much of a documentary -- so we tried Doug Raine as the voice
of the computer and the rest is history: he was perfect for it!
But originally he would have been the narrator of the film:
there was even a prologue in black-and-white, along the lines
of Cinerama, where you started in black-and-white and open up,
which is by now a well-entrenched cliché, to mix a metaphor.
For that we shot Carl Sagan, and a lot of the eminent
astronomers of the time, talking about the cosmos.
That whole thing was thrown out -- again it was too dry, too
didactic. Went through a lot of permutations, there was a stack
of scripts. Arthur Clarke would come from Ceylon and spend a
few weeks until he'd get worried about taxes and then he'd have
to leave the country and go on tour. It was entertaining.
Larry